Window
It scares me that I lose time. It’s dawn, I’m aware, and I’m awake for fajr, standing before my bedroom window overlooking the adjacent apartment complex. But I can’t remember a moment prior. Not my eyes peeling open, my hand fishing under the pillow for my phone to check the time, my feet tugging through sweatpants or leading me to this window. I must have done all these things. My wife is asleep with spongy earplugs and a foam black mask because the next turn to feed our four-month-old is mine. She sleeps in a room across the tight hall in a pale red crib. It’s too hot for October, and if a siren sounded, as they often do, a chorus of coyotes would sing to it, but it’s silent and still, no sound or breeze coming through the window screen. I can’t move. I usually pause in front of this window before stepping into the bathroom to quietly do wudu. There’s something about the glow of the lights that remain on all night and the drawn curtains and locked doors behind locked screens and the two vacant red chairs set next to the second floor door centered in my view. Or it’s the way the second floor, just slightly lower than ours, has steps that seem to reach toward me.
I don’t know the old woman who lives in the second floor apartment with the two red chairs outside, only that she sometimes sits there and listens to her news of choice loudly on her tablet. Sometimes I think she does it on purpose so that I’ll hear, but it’s unlikely she’s ever seen me or my wife or knows that we’re brown. It was through another window—the wide one next to our front door that looks out over our courtyard—that a neighbor did see me. It was last week, though it feels more recent than that, and sometimes I feel as if it’s still happening. As I hovered by the mailboxes in our courtyard, sorting my junk mail into the recycling bin, this neighbor said to me, “I saw you praying.” I looked up from a flyer for the pizzeria down the street. He was squinting at me, waiting for an answer. The green on his Favre jersey had long since faded, but the green in his shorts glistened. He looked meaty in the sun. I said, “Yes, you probably did.” His hands were in soiled gardening gloves. He gardens, fixes things around the complex—the hose, the laundry machines, the water heater. He is useful, and the other neighbors, mostly elderly immigrants from Poland and Armenia, like him for this. He is friendly to them in a way that I find condescending. I see who he is. “Don’t worry, I won’t pray against the Packers,” I said, trying to seem nonchalant. If I truly had been nonchalant, I would have finished sorting my mail, but instead I smiled which he didn’t return, and then skirted past his sweaty body on the narrow path between two bushes, junk mail in hand, still smiling to no one, and skipped up the stairs to my apartment.
When I told my wife, she asked, “How did he say it?” I knew I wasn’t explaining it well. I always struggle to convey to her what I mean when I’m scared. “He’s not mean, just ignorant,” she said as she stuck a baby bottle in the microwave. I told her I didn’t want to raise a daughter around him, though I didn’t mean exactly him, more the idea of him, and didn’t mean around him so much as I didn’t want to raise a daughter knowing people like him existed anywhere at all. It came out melodramatic because that’s how I felt. I was embarrassed. She shook her head and left to feed our child. The only thing that calms me when I’m fixated on a worry, on some hypothetical danger, is to visualize in vivid detail the worst case coming true.
I still can’t budge from the window. Besides the single faux lantern fixed above the steps, the other lights are tucked into the ceiling where I can’t see them. Mostly they illuminate the walls, make the white stucco gleam and the rose red upholstery on the two chairs glimmer. There are satellite dishes running along the roof and above them a backdrop of trees as if painted by a thick brush, but I can’t lift my gaze to make them my focus. I don’t want to. The two floors of the apartment complex frame my view like a two-story stage, and I watch for someone or something to make an entrance.
Last night, which was only hours ago, my wife and I started to watch a film I think I may have seen as a child. It began with the man, his wife and son, and another couple driving to a cabin in the country. The man and his wife are charming, erudite, and liberal. The film thinks it has nothing to do with race, so they’re all white. They arrive at the cabin, which has motion sensors rigged to flood lights as a kind of alarm system. For animals, the man says, but I don’t believe him. It’s late. They put the child to bed, and the two couples go to their rooms. The man and his wife joke in whispers and, it’s intimated, make love. Later, after the flood lights are tripped with no apparent cause, the man peers into the dark from the bed and says to himself, “Is that someone there?” and a being with big black alien eyes slides out from behind a dresser. The effect isn’t realistic, but it’s strange, slippery. The man shakes it off, which is actually realistic, it’s what we do. And then a white light floods the cabin, and flooded our living room, and I realized my wife was gone. She wasn’t on the couch with me anymore. I told myself it couldn’t have been the light, she must have gone to bed, and I watched some more alone. There’s a scene in which the man is scared and erratic, and his wife is upset with him. She calls his fear “self-indulgent,” and he stalks off with a shotgun and scours the property. When he comes back into the cabin, he thinks he sees one of them, a different kind, shorter and fleshy. It’s huddling behind a counter, and he shoots, and a lamp explodes, and his wife appears in the doorway, and he shoots, and there’s the sound of buckshot splitting wood. He places the shotgun on the ground, and they cry together, because something is wrong with him.
I want to turn and wake my wife right now to tell her about the scene, but it wouldn’t go the way I want it to. Moreover, the window has taken my breath. It wants me to see something.
When I was a kid, I saw a lot of movies I shouldn’t have seen with my brother and sister who were much older. I think I remember watching the film with them. We watched horror movies because our mother was dying, and there was a jinn in our home that both my brother and sister saw and I often felt when I couldn’t fall asleep. It felt good to watch the movies and be scared together, but then it’d be over and I would have to go to bed alone. I stayed awake so many nights feeling her watch me. My brother and sister didn’t think she was evil, but bad things kept happening.
I used to play every day with this boy who lived a house down. He had an older brother and sister who were nice, but they moved away. Two years passed, and I forgot about them. One day I came home from school, and no one was home. An hour later, my sister came through the door only to change her clothes before heading out to that family’s house, which was somewhere far I hadn’t been. She told me there was an accident and my old friend’s brother was dead, and our dad and brother were already there, and then she left. I pinned myself to the couch in front of the television. I didn’t eat or drink. The sun set, and I didn’t pray maghrib or even draw the curtains. I was too scared to walk down the hallway to the bathroom because I hadn’t switched on any of the house lights. The NCAA finals came on, and there was a point guard with a Muslim name. Outside the living room window, the backyard darkened and disappeared, and the wooden fence faded to pale teeth lost in a mouth and then were swallowed. The images from the television twitched against the walls. I watched the celebration, interviews, and highlights and then SportsCenter on repeat until 3am when my family switched on the lights and looked at me as if they’d forgotten I was alive.
Last night I didn’t want to go to bed, still under the film’s spell, so I stayed on my phone googling concealed carry statistics, wondering what the odds were that Favre downstairs had a gun. I imagined hearing him come up the steps, turn toward our door. How time would warp around the sound and the eruption of light splintering wood, as I watched, still fixed to the couch.
When I got nauseous from scrolling, I finally rose and did isha in the living room by the window but in the dark and then tiptoed down the hall into bed. I still don’t remember waking for fajr and coming to this window. The thing with the lights is that they feel wrong being on with no one and nothing there, unless something happens, so you believe something must. That’s why I can’t stop watching, and I’m watching when the lights go out, all of them. The shine of the white stucco recedes. A breeze as hot as our daughter’s milk breath brushes through the screen. There’s a figure in one of the chairs. I should be able to see it clearly, see that it’s the old woman, but the figure is charcoal and ashy and still, as if paused in a film. I can’t make it out, and I can’t look away either, but I hear something in the living room and then steps down the hall. I should leave the window to go see, but my feet are clammy on the wood floor. I remember listening as a child so hard for my mom’s breathing in the next room. Unable to move. My throat would seal as it’s doing now. The same words poised on my tongue even then. “Is that someone there?”
The year before Mom died, we took a day trip to an old town nearby. On the drive back, she told us a story, sitting in the backseat between my sister and me, about a young girl she had seen on a dirt road when she herself was a young woman. The road was on the way to the market, and it was daylight and busy enough. My mom was walking on the edge of the road and had a feeling to turn around—she always told stories in which she had this feeling—and when she turned, she saw a young girl in a yellow dupatta, pretty she said, swooped off the road into a carriage. It was hard for my mom to see inside because the carriage was hurtling away so quickly, but she saw the girl being pushed under a heap of blankets, she saw her face when she screamed, “bachao!” (save me). She said she could still see her face, the way her mouth stretched to let the sound out.
The night we brought our daughter home from the hospital there were fireworks. I held her by this window for a little while as my wife slept. The explosions didn’t unnerve her. She stared out so evenly I rocked her just to know she was still alive. Whenever her gaze shifted to me, there was something so familiar about the sensation. Being watched by something utterly implacable.
I’ve lost time. I don’t know where it is. I can’t wake my wife because I’m caught in the window and our bedroom door is shut when it shouldn’t be. Something is in our home that I never could have kept out. I hear the crib creak, relieved of its burden.
Ahsan Butt (@ahsanb_)was born in Toronto, is of Pakistani descent, and currently lives in Los Angeles. His short fiction and essays have appeared in West Branch, Barrelhouse, The Massachusetts Review, The Normal School, SmokeLong Quarterly, Blue Minaret, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is currently a Senior Editor at South Asian Avant Garde: A Dissident Literary Anthology (SAAG).